Mighty Bach

Matthaüs-Passion
Barbican

‘God save us…it’s just as if one were at an opera!’ a woman is quoted as saying at a performance of Bach’s Matthaüs-Passion in the 18th century. If she meant that it is hard to imagine a more intensely dramatic experience — it is other kinds of experience, too, of course — then she was right. It was fashionable 40 years or so ago to say that the St Matthew Passion is less dramatic than the St John Passion, a view argued by Britten and his acolytes. I think they were wrong: the Matthaüs-Passion is at least as dramatic as its shorter twin, but it has other elements, too. The greater number of long arias in the Matthaüs-Passion means that we are encouraged to reflect on the events which are being depicted or evoked for us with incomparable vividness, while the Johannes-Passion sweeps us along but, in my view, gathers less dramatic momentum as it proceeds because we get less deeply involved with the action; in the Matthaüs-Passion we are made to realise at every point what hangs on the events, so that for the non- or anti-believer such as myself it is an overpowering and at the same time deeply disconcerting work. I know of no other in which Christian faith and the central events on which it is based are presented so movingly: how can one respond to it with the intensity which it compels without subscribing to the doctrines which it promulgates? And if one finds them not only incredible but repugnant, how is it that this work shakes one to the core as almost nothing else does?

This crisis which Bach’s masterpiece creates whenever it has an adequate performance was unavoidable at the Barbican on Palm Sunday.